Serious Eats: Talk

Trotter Gear help!

Posted by mh330, Jan 24, 2011

After reading a recommendation for Fergus Henderson's trotter gear right here in Talk last week, i decided to run out and make some. I found the recipe in a New York Times article, which recommended using a bottle of red wine if you can't find Madeira. I basically followed the recipe, assembled the whole thing, and stuck it in the oven at 350. About an hour into it i realized that there was very little happening in that pot -- my vegetables were still pretty hard and i decided to stick it on the stove top instead -- it is after all a stock, no? Why shouldn't i be able to give it a low simmer?

So, after about 3-4 hours of oven/stove time, i pulled out the trotters and de-boned them. I was left with sticky goo and skin, not a speck of meat. The recipe and associated pics i saw in the web had great shredded meat chunks, but my mostly-pig-skin wouldn't readily shred, so i wound up chopping it. Now i have a way-too-red-winey broth (i think the whole bottle of red was a poor suggested substitute) that is mildly gelatinous at best, filled with chunks of chopped chewy pig skin. Not what i was expecting. (i was expecting a very gelatinous almost jello like stock with some bits of pig floating in it).

Thoughts on what went wrong?

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